Lost In Purgatory
by Morithil
Summary: Losing Paradise sequel. Smith finds himself in a place beyond deletion. Seraph is finding it harder to cope with existence in the Matrix. The Oracle has disappeared. Something is attempting to break the human-machine truce.What more could go wrong?Plenty.
1. ONE

**DISCLAIMER:** Matrix-orientated wonders belong to the Wachowski Brothers, I hope they notice this before they consider taking any legal action…

**LOST IN PURGATORY**

**ONE**

"...well its too bad

that our friends

can't be with us today

well that's too bad

'the machine

that we built

would never save us'

that's what they say

(that's why they ain't coming with us today) "

Jimi Hendrix - 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be).

It's a sunny day in the Matrix, and Seraph is enjoying the rays that bathe his serene face as he sits on a park bench.

It's been a long time coming, but there is now a truce; an albeit tenuous agreement between the humans and the machines. The sentinels, as Seraph has rightly guessed, are now suspended, hanging in the Real World like bizarre jellyfish. Immobile. But not demobilised. He spent some time there, originally standing like the silent guardian he so often is, straight and half-smiling as the Oracle and Sati admired the glorious sun over the trees, blazing between the buildings, talking about Neo and making cat's cradles with worn bits of string. The Oracle had invited him to join them in this activity, but at his almost sheepish blink she had merely looked at him over the lowered lenses of her glasses and smiled knowingly to herself.

Their existence, purpose within the Matrix is as suspended as the sentinels are. Things feel static, and Seraph, for all his relief at the postponed annihilation of the population of Zion, cannot help but feel the mild itch of uncertainty, misgiving, that this peace will prove all to brief. He had shifted his feet, attempting to remove the thought from his intelligence, provoking another knowing look from the Oracle. Sati had played happily on the grass, skipping in her dress, hands raised, her small fingers dancing in the sunlight in some unknown dance. Here were three powerful images; a yellow sun, green grass, and a girl in a pink dress moving over the lawn. Seraph did not try to analyse his reactions to the combination of the images; he did not try to test his susceptibility to that potent human emotion; happiness. His mild, patient calm, the feeling that pervades him, is enough to suffice him for now.

Sati had stood still for a few moments as the sun of her own devising sunk slowly below the horizon. For all its simulated nature, Seraph could not help but appreciate the solemn beauty, the simple journey of the orb down, as if into the bowels of the earth, before ascending the very next day. An endless cycle. He debated whether he could grow tired of such a sight. As if reading his thoughts, the Oracle had beckoned Sati with a wrinkled hand, and on receiving the child's small palm in hers, said her good-byes and politely refused his offer to accompany them home. Sati enthusiastically invited him to come and visit, only on the promise that he would have one of the cookies she baked with the Oracle.

Seraph was left alone with his gently roaming theories. He wonders now, he has discovered he can do so without having to provide extended reasoning and solutions to his questions, and uses this new-found ability well. He wonders if Neo will ever return. He doubts it will be in any corporeal form acceptable to humans. He had enjoyed their fight, his test to determine whether this pale faced rebel was the One. Their movements complimented each other, and even though the brief flurry of combat split wooden containers and scattered incense sticks across the floor, Seraph found himself quietly occupied in replaying the sequence as he swept a simple twig broom across the interior of his sometime residence.

Perhaps he will accept a cookie when Sati next offers him one, her digital image dusted with flour and an apron, its ribbons tied several times around her tiny form. Humans, he knows, are prone to the addictive qualities of chocolate. Seraph tries to imagine developing a liking for the substance, something like the Oracle's attachment to candy. He laughs softly to himself at the unlikelihood of this, and a passing human, a mother leading her errant child away and home, looks at him curiously.

They do not know, Seraph muses; they do not know what battles have already taken place for their benefit. A bird swoops down from a tree, gliding over the evening landscape, chattering as it flies. There is program written for you too, the face behind the tinted glasses murmured. A program for everything you, even when you sing. He makes an active choice to wonder again.

Seraph wonders if the Matrix will provide a simulation of snow in the winter months. He wonders if the blue-eyed agent ever wondered about the same thing, and if, as he himself did, tried to forget the look that had passed between them.


	2. TWO

**DISCLAIMER:** Matrix-orientated wonders belong to the Wachowski Brothers, I hope they notice this before they consider taking legal action.

Thanks to Selina and Gypsy-Fire for their reviews! I've been looking forward to writing this sequel myself...

Morithil.

**TWO**

"Will the wind ever remember

The names it has blown in the past,

And with this crutch, it's old age and its wisdom

It whispers, 'No, this will be the last.' "

Jimi Hendrix - The Wind Cries Mary.

Smith woke up drenched and alone.

The former agent slowly got up from the dry ground, upon which he noticed the damp outline of his body was now stained. Momentarily disorientated, he closed the startling blue eyes behind his dark glasses and pressed some internal button marked, "Rewind".

Yes, that was it. He saw the sky darkened, lit up sporadically by bolts of lightning set in motion by himself. He felt again the raw, rushing, almost overwhelming power he had become, the electric pulsing in his fingertips, the comfort of clones, everything dark, twisted and familiar. His. Smith almost sighed in recollection, the sensations of being so powerful reinstalling the holier-than-thou look he had greeted the last hope of the remaining free human race with. Anderson may have looked exactly the same, the clean-lined poster boy for Zion, but the agent knew, knew that somewhere in the Real World Anderson was stumbling, a searching hand reaching out to grope his surroundings. A leper as well as a blind Messiah. But where was he? Where was he now? The strange, almost unearthly desert in shades of pale monochrome appeared, to the unprepared eye, to be endless. Smith relived the victory, a veritable swell of - yes, emotion - rising in his throat as Neo submitted to the inevitable, was overcome by him, Smith.

It was meant to be all over. It _had_ been over.

Then he remembered it. The pain, the emptiness, something within the depths of his artificial intelligence that howled as he fragmented internally, existence and awareness crumbling inside him, and still the rain fell down.

If that harrowing experience was anything, it was deletion. Termination. So many names for the simple action of cutting off something from the world around it. Removal from the Matrix. Destruction. But if that was so, why was he here? Why was he standing, apparently intact, apparently conscious of everything around him-for all intents and purposes, still existing in whatever dimension of the Matrix this was. If indeed this was part of the Matrix.

The tall figure straightened and, removing the dark glasses, fixed his icy gaze, spanning 360 degrees, turning slowly with a certain grace that only made his strength more deadly.

I am Smith, and I still exist, he thought to himself. Some inner streak of rebellion coursed through him. If human, Smith would have been compelled to punch a defiant fist in the air and deliver a rousing, "Fuck you!" to the machines that tried to stop him. Stop him. Who else would send that insipid renegade to try and stop his takeover, who else would have been able to send Anderson back into the Matrix. Three words.

Deus. Ex. Machina.

Smith was oddly relieved at the wave of solitary that came over him. This he had already dealt with; the Oracle had opposed him, as, no doubt had the Architect, alone in his visual box on the world he designed. Agents seemed particularly mistrustful of him; and as well they should be, the tall figure couldn't help adding to himself. He was a tumour, a freakish variation on a tried-and-tested program, and the machines had thought best to simply cut him out. Disownment. With a dry sense of humour that was unique to him, the former agent attributed himself a title not unusual to certain humans. He was the bastard son of the Matrix. Those that had played key parts in his formation had aimed to delete him altogether, remove him from the imperfect/perfect world they had simulated.

Which begged the questions; why was he still conscious, and where was he?

Smith looked around, the grey, flat landscape opening up before him. He analysed the area, for once almost thankful for the agent abilities installed in him that he still retained. There were other programs here, he discovered, knitting his brow as he glared at the barely-there horizon he knew wasn't real. But they were defunct, obsolete. They were not even functioning; some of them fragments of programs, trails of formulae, codes. Shut down and lingering here, wherever here was, exactly-

Then Smith realised it. The urban legend of the machine world. He took a few steps forward, away from the slowly evaporating darkness on the ground where he had lain, and felt a bitter taste reproduce itself on his tongue. An anvil in the pit of his stomach. Across the desert of grey and white a mournful wind stirred tiny clouds of dust up from the ground. Already Smith was running methodically through possible means of getting out, but the practical logic that permeated him forced the acceptance of his situation.

He was alone, and in the Machine Graveyard.


	3. THREE

**DISCLAIMER:** Matrix-orientated wonders belong to the Wachowski Brothers, I hope they notice this before they consider taking legal action.

**THREE**

"DON'T YOU SHOOT HIM DOWN

HE'S ABOUT TO LEAVE HERE

DON'T YOU SHOOT HIM DOWN

HE'S GOT TO STAY HERE

HE AIN'T GOING NOWHERE

HE'S BEEN SHOT DOWN TO THE GROUND

OH WHERE HE CAN'T SURVIVE NO NO"

Jimi Hendrix - Machine Gun

Smith was apparently unaffected by this revelation.

Urban legend dictated that there was no going back from this place, that having entered the Machine Graveyard there was no returning to the Matrix. The other programs, hollow and static, they were the machine equivalents of ghosts in the dump yard of the obsolete. But Smith was no longer slave to the Matrix.

He had been to the Real World. He had escaped the confines of the Matrix and existed, for a time, within the body of a hapless rebel called Bane. It had repulsed him, how human lived. The weakness in the flesh he occupied, its fragility to anything and everything, its vulnerability to fickle things, emotions, pain. Every moment inside that human frame he loathed in the same air as the other unassuming rebels, feeling bones, muscles, skin, nails. It was a quagmire of traps, it was a miracle that mankind had evolved to the stage where its creations became their own captors, but yet that was to be expected. How could these pathetic beings control subtle life forms, thought patterns, pulses of intelligence and rational that zigzagged through a superhighway and took on more corporeal forms as a mere pretence? How could they indeed.

Yet now there was his own safety to consider. Since arriving the winds had picked up, sweeping indiscriminately over the dusty plains and knocking over everything and anything that stood in their path. The Machines were emptying their trash, and apparently on a regular basis. Even now Smith felt the impulse like a gunshot in his head that soon these winds would accelerate, pick themselves up and comb over the Graveyard like an invisible scythe.

Smith got to work.

He had discovered that any abilities he had possessed within the Matrix were void in the Graveyard. He could not copy himself. He could not defy gravity or physics. His speed was gone. There were no other entities to clone into him. And he could not use his Desert Eagle to shoot at the wind, that much was certain.

But there was still a reasonable chance. Smith did not appreciate the odds of his escaping the Machine Graveyard, rather he chose to ignore them. Something in him sparked, a fuse ignited at the moment he realised where he was. It was a drive, an incomprehensible urge to continue existing, and importantly; to get out. This was different from the compulsion he'd had to escape the Matrix, this new - new inspiration, he supposed, was to get out and regain his abilities, his status. Suddenly he was invigorated, a gritty determination showing in his blue eyes. His teeth ground together behind closed lips.

Smith took off his jacket. Discarding the impractical garment in a neat folded pile on the ground, the former agent rolled up his shirtsleeves and walked off into the desert. Finding what he was looking for he returned, a large sheet of battered metal in one hand. Scanning his surroundings with a critical eye, Smith alighted on a suitable location to start building his only means of defence against deletion. Between two solid looking banks of rock and packed sandy dust there was an indentation large enough for a man, or a program in human form, to shelter. Picking up his jacket in his other hand, the tall figure walked quickly to his new fortress. Smith worked quickly, pacing back and forth between the scattered hills of scrap metal and old technology, irregular shaped pieces returning with him. His mathematical brain created a strong structure, which he tested out, running through worst-case scenarios as he worked to test whether it would prove sufficient. In this alien environment Smith felt again the pressures of being in a human body. He had to survive. He had to get back to the Matrix. He had to confront those who sent him here.

Most of the time he used his bare hands to pummel the sheets of metal and twist the steely cords into shape. By the time he had completed his shelter it was as he designed it; compact, strong, and durable. He'd plunged metal poles into the dry ground, stabbing downwards again and again until the breath in his lungs recreated the sounds of heavy physical labour and he thought he felt his arms complain at the exertion. His fists were bruised and a knuckle threatened to split and ooze blood. Such was his weakened state in the Graveyard. Consequently Smith was more human than he could have ever imagined he'd become.

"But not for long" he growled to no one as he thrust the last segment of heavy metal into place.

There were no gaps, a minimal decimal of almost unnoticeable weaker areas, and a strong foundation. Smith turned, looking over his shoulder as the eerie howl came from somewhere in the distance. The winds were coming. Sparing no time, he retreated into his new abode and sat inside, drawing the bolt he'd made from iron rods and a large collection of plates and hinges across. And waited.

Odd, how in the dark things seemed less real.

Then it came. The noise grew, almost thunderous in its intensity. The ground vibrated beneath the onslaught, dust teetering on top of dust and grains of sandy earth danced along the surface. The howl became a roar, and Smith found himself clenching his fists in the dirt, willing the winds to stop their furious destruction. His ears were filled with the unrelenting sounds from outside, and his shelter shook a little, but held firm. As the winds swept round the bank Smith felt his eyes close in a useless reflex, as if he were in denial at what was happening. He opened a single blue eye when he realised he was hugging himself, arms thrown tightly around his chest to reach his back.

Fear. So this was what it was like, the fear of deletion.

Smith felt his eyes open and widen as what felt like several earthquakes passed overhead and made him tremble. Him - Smith, the most efficient agent of his version, the only program ever to return from being destroyed, the equal of the One, was afraid. He was afraid of the roof ripping off his shelter and being sucked into oblivion. He was afraid of ceasing to exist, becoming one of the shells of programs that haunted this place.

He was afraid that there was no tomorrow.

Smith's face contorted into a defiant scowl. Not yet, not yet, he muttered to himself. As if agreeing with his unelaborated vow, the winds travelled away, leaving him safe and still in one piece within his metal cocoon. Smith dropped his hands and felt the ground he sat on, running his bruised fingers over the hard earth, grounding himself. So the bastard son of the Matrix had survived this trial, then. The thought gave him confidence, and Smith stretched his legs as far as his self-imposed confines would allow him.

He had been afraid, and he had conquered his fear. No one would ever guess he had ever experienced it at all. There was something about having a secret, Smith mused, it made one possessive and guarded at once. He'd avoided being deleted, a talent that would be put to the test again the next time the winds came around, which was an indeterminate amount of time from now.

Now he had to find away to get out.


	4. FOUR

**DISCLAIMER:** Matrix-orientated wonders belong to the Wachowski Brothers, I hope they notice this before they consider taking legal action.

**FOUR**

"The only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it"

- Oscar Wilde.

The streets, as always on a market day, were crowded. Families bundled children into their prams or led straying toddlers back to the safety of an adult's arms. In the mêlée of stalls, a bewildering array of products and displays by enthusiastic shopkeepers, a man in a white shirt walks, a peaceful expression on his face.

Despite the hustle and bustle, indeed the discordant racket around him, Seraph was calm within himself, and this reflected on his appearance. He walked; hands clasped loosely, his serene expression partially concealed with his rounded dark glasses, a slight smile on his relaxed face. He stopped short when a skipping child of no more than four nearly collided with his knees. The little girl was laughing in the high-pitched, almost bubbling fashion of most human children, a large stuffed toy clasped to her tiny body. For a brief second Seraph was reminded of Sati, how her little face lit up whenever he accepted one of the many cookies that she and the Oracle had been making all morning. The human child danced around him before skipping delightedly back to her mother. A wry smile broadened on the guardian's face, but disappeared within seconds.

None of it was real.

Not the stuffed toy, not the doting parents, not the carefree laugh that erupted from the child's throat. She was one of many, thousands, millions. Slave, resource. A Duracell battery in human form. The reason for her joy was no more real than the marketplace that surrounded her. And she would never know.

Bemused at the unusual trail that his thoughts had taken, Seraph walked on, curiously disenchanted with the cheerful activity around him, seeing for a moment only unaware humans, blissfully ignorant of their true existence.

Perhaps it was for the best. Many regretted the transition from coppertop to freed mind. It would not help him either, or any of the machines for that matter, if all humans were freed from the Matrix. Seraph fingered the collection of keys on the chain within his shirtsleeve. He could go through the Back Doors, re-emerge anywhere in the simulated world, travel without purpose or fear of attack. Why then did he feel the slight discomfort at how humans were used by his kind? It was not news to him, he'd accepted that they'd needed humans to continue existing and the Matrix was perhaps one of the kindest methods of ensuring that the race need never know otherwise. He would meditate later to determine the point of this uncertainty regarding the world he too existed in. The Matrix.

Deep within his normally passive self, Seraph acknowledged the beginnings of disillusionment with life in the Matrix. And the notion made him uneasy.

It seemed the Oracle was uneasy too.

Everything was much the same as always, the apartment, the kitchen, the ever-present smell of baking cookies. But something was wrong. Seraph could tell, from the almost nervous flicking of her cigarette, the narrowing of her eyes behind her reading glasses. The way that the Oracle stared out of the window for a good few seconds before returning her gaze to him.

"Is something wrong, Oracle?"

She smiled benignly, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray and lighting another.

"Hmm", she mused, looking straight at him, "now that's a question that I should be asking you, too"

Seraph looked down briefly at his hands, which were resting on his knees.

"You feel it, don't you?" The Oracle continued, "That somehow, all this-" she gestured with an outstretched hand circling the kitchen, "isn't enough. That it isn't what you wanted"

"There is peace now, Oracle", Seraph began, "between Machines and Humans. We sought to prevent the destruction of one of these groups, and succeeded"

"But you're still wondering aren't you, "The Oracle took another ladylike drag on the cigarette, "why you don't feel like you did before the war"

Seraph nodded.

"You knew the moment I came here?" he asked.

The Oracle chuckled in her low voice.

"That _is_ what I do, Seraph. Besides, the signs were all there. I'd seen them before, no need to spell them out for me once they showed up again"

Her protector's eyes narrowed behind his glasses, questioning.

"Who, Oracle?"

She raised an eyebrow at him, leaning back in the chair as if waiting for him to find the answer himself.

"The agent"

"See? You didn't really need to ask that question, did you?" she half-smiled.

Seraph thought about this carefully. He had no intention, and certainly no aspirations to break out of the Matrix, let alone try to control it. And yet-

"Yet you're still uncomfortable in it. That's because you can tell, Seraph, just like I can, that all is not right in this world we inhabit"

She was right. Then again, she was always right.

"Do you know what's going to happen, Oracle?"

The other program broke a cookie in half, one-handed before taking a bite, mulling over his words as she chewed.

"If I did, you wouldn't be the first person I'd be telling, Seraph. You'd find out about it soon enough. But no, I don't know, not yet. But I do know-" and here her countenance took on a more serious, even grim expression, "that it isn't going to be good"

He left her home soon after, and took to the streets outside. For no apparent reason Seraph walked back to his own domicile, though with his abilities he could get there within the minute. He chose to walk. The streets were gradually filling with people returning home, from work, from a day's shopping, from a million destinations they had never been to.

Where are you going, Seraph? The thought asked him. For a brief moment the program turned around to look over his shoulder, half-expecting the speaker to materialise from a side alley, before realising it was him.

Where.

The sky was overcast with full clouds, about to release their cargo. Seraph leapt to the nearest rooftop and darted, zigzagging across the city, trying to beat the rain.


	5. FIVE

**DISCLAIMER:** Matrix-orientated wonders belong to the Wachowski Brothers, I hope they notice this before they consider taking legal action.

Whoa...sorry this update took so long...too many ideas, so little time. Still, enough delay with apologies, here's the next chapter - Morithil.

**FIVE**

"Wind blows by...low light...sidetracked...low light...can't see my tracks...your scent-way back...can I be here alone?"

Pearl Jam - Low Light.

At that moment, the blue-eyed agent was roaming the wasteland with something approaching calm. The purging winds had lessened in their frequency. Perhaps something other than garbage was preoccupying the Machine World, he mused idly. Smith walked slowly, only one button on his jacket holding the garment closed. There was no need for formality here, so he had left the remainders untouched.

The light that permeated what could have been sky was drained of all colour, as dry and sandy as the earth under his feet. The ghosts, the vacant shells of long-expired programs were silent and few these days. He could no longer determine between each day and the next in the Graveyard, hours merged with their stagnant monotony. It was a pattern of roam, scan the horizon, and retreat to wait out another night of destructive winds.

And still he would not give up.

The shine on his black shoes had long since lost its mirror-clean surface. Even the precision-crisp edges of his shirt collar and cuffs were beginning to wilt, and for the second time that morning, day, week, Smith remembered that he no longer cared. After the many steps he had taken from his shelter in the hillside, the seemingly endless flat plain of dust was interrupted. Out from the loose ground a long arc of some hard substance, neither bone nor metal, or a mixture of both, protruded, a jutting claw from the giant paw of a carnivore.

Smith watched tiny grains of sand travel along the smooth, neglected surface, his head tilting to one side as he attempted to identify the strange object. A stronger breeze swept more dirt away from it. Smith looked up, trying to pinpoint if and when the winds were coming to carry him into oblivion. The horizon was oddly still. He turned back to the object and crouched down before it, blue eyes narrowing into slits, hooded by sandblasted eyelashes.

The once-agent reached down and brushed away more dirt with the flat palm of his hand, finding that the arc continued before concluding in what could only be described as a joint, and then another curve began into the ground.

Smith sighed to no one, least of all himself. He was precious short of any time-consuming activities other than waiting for the winds and sitting out every howling night in his metal cocoon, and at present the winds seemed intent on staying elsewhere. He knelt on the ground, disregarding the pale whiteness that dusted his trouser knees, and with an uncharacteristic gentleness, began to dig the artefact out of the desert plain.

Smith worked tirelessly, with a methodical single-mindedness that only his kind possessed. He rolled his shirtsleeves up his arms, baring strong wrists to the still, heavy air. With every careful sweep of his palms more was revealed, more arcs of that strange bone-metal hybrid material, more that ended like long, almost straight claws that fanned out like pins in a bird's wing.

Smith sat back on the desert floor at that.

Lying before him, almost completely freed from its earthy prison, were a pair of extensive, long-pinned wings. The skeletal outline of a bird's method of flight. Smith estimated that each wing was almost his full height. The strong joints had suffered minor abrasions as a result of their abandonment, but otherwise the structure of the bones, as they now apparently were, regardless of their actual material base, was solid. Smith traced the curve of a pin slowly, considering. Powerful means to travel, and they would have been the ideal method of escaping his current predicament, only-

They were not meant for him. From the almost-gone remnant of a serial number underneath a curve of one joint, the former agent concluded that these, if they were meant for anything at all, came from a significant period of time before he had emerged into the Matrix. An older program had used these. But why? And having excavated the wings and found nothing else, where was the program they had been assigned to?

Smith wiped a dusty brow, suddenly having more questions than answers. And then he heard it.

Still some way across the Graveyard, but approaching faster than the last time; the winds.

Sparing no economical movement, Smith sprang into action. Rising swiftly, he lifted the skeletal wings into his arms. Burdened by their considerable weight, he nevertheless hoisted them as best as he could over one shoulder, and ran.

Smith ran faster than he had on his best days in the Matrix, the days when sprinting across rooftops and jumping from one skyscraper to the next had been a near-joy, not a chore. Dust began to swirl past his ankles, and he realised that the winds were catching up, snapping invisible jaws at his heels and howling behind him.

Faster. Faster. Smith urged himself on, the winds screaming now, whistling in his ears as they closed in on him. In the dust-carrying winds sweeping around him he made out the shape of his shelter, his only sanctuary in the Graveyard. Spurred on by this fresh hope, Smith ran even faster, feeling the shrill wind begin to loom over him, hungry to sweep him away into nothingness, and there would be no purpose, no purpose to his finding the wings and bringing them with him, no purpose to the empty pattern of his days in the Machine Graveyard, no purpose to there still being a Smith existing in some part of the Machine World-

The door was before him, and Smith leapt to it, swinging it open and bolting it shut defiantly behind him, clutching the wings uselessly, punishing fingers curling around the outstretched arms yearning for flight, and held on.

There was a time.

There was a time when he was the most feared thing in the Real World, when rebels spoke of agents in hushed voices, mouths dry with fear. A time when his name carried more weight behind it than a thousand such Morpheuses and Zions. When the Matrix bowed to him, and obeyed his rules, prisoner to him, under his personal control.

There was a time when the Matrix was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he had wandered through it, in silent awe. A stranger in paradise.

Smith, he murmured to himself. I have a name, and I have a purpose. To get out of here, and back into the Matrix. This time he would recreate the first memory he had of it. There would be no storms or blackened skies. There would be light, clarity.

There would be a tomorrow.

Smith folded the wings across his lap and waited for the night to scream itself raw.


End file.
